To many, Goa, a coastal locale which lies somewhere within western India, is a land where intoxicants such as Urrack and Feni are served a plenty in bars, whose structural real estate is generally dominated by posters of female “bombs” posing with misplaced pom-poms. To a 15-year old boy that I once was, Goa is but a land of unforgettable mischief – a place where I can unleash my usually restrained mind and get thanked by getting spanked for the results.

One fine day in the hot month of May, I visited a pot-bellied, coffee coloured, Konkani speaking, pygmy heighted man, which, for the sake of brevity and unless repugnant to the context or meaning thereof, be referred to as my uncle. I didn’t recognize him as he had changed his features over the years since I last visited him. He had 32 new hair follicles sprouting from each ear and his stomach had grown by 200% at the very least. Otherwise, he looked just like our former prime minister, Vajpayee, innocently hiding a big kadai within his sparse Indian attire.

It was vacation time, and on my arrival that evening, my uncle sat opposite me, fondly nursing a glass of strong beer. For those like me, gifted with an extra wild imagination, “nursing” does not imply breastfeeding, though from the strategic position of the glass, it would have seemed so at that point in time. Yes, I know, pictorials of males “nursing” booze invoke thoroughly disgusting feelings, especially in heterosexual males like me. Anyway, with mandatory greeting preliminaries dispensed with, I took a seat across my uncle – again, this sentence is not to be interpreted literally – within his large drawing room. It was then that I truly had a chance to comprehend the actual size of that mammoth corporation, as, this time, no vest or garment was adorned. The dark brown belly was huge and immensely hairy, with the centered “O’ perpetually formed from a near constant cry for replenishment. A short while later, after treating my virgin body to several sips of mature beer, I regarded the stomach once again. It now looked like an image of a big sleepy boob, dominating the entire frontal landscape of my uncle, and possibly, influencing his personality and relation with the other genders as well. I stared at it, mesmerized, and suddenly was overcome by an incredible urge to squeeze that matka with cold, shivering hands. I don’t know if it was the booze, but it was just then, that my perspective began to gradually alter. I blinked several times with a hope that the exercise would clear the fantasy element from my line of sight. In an expansive frontal view, my uncle’s two little sagging sumo-wrestler booblings looked like droopy ears; the proud red heat boil near the sternum passed off as a nose; and the navel, which widened horizontally because of a slouched posture, seemed like a toothless grinning mouth. He caught me staring at his paunch and seemed embarrassed. He immediately covered his navel in a sweeping gesture that I would regard as thoroughly feminine. He must have thought that his beer glass would have blocked my view of his navel. Sadly, he didn’t know that I have superhuman powers of seeing through transparent glass. Interestingly, the beer in the glass caused the image of the navel to expand and distort by virtue of light refraction. Since my mother is a pro at sewing, I made a mental note to request her to stitch a one cup brassiere for support, because who knew, five years from now, that stomach, if left unsupported, would definitely grow to shade the knees, and it would look a trifle unsightly. All the fishy village goan babes would then want to look the other way.

A little while later, my uncle sat on his rocking chair, watching TV and sipping piping hot chicken soup. I was beside him reading a book titled “Chicken soup for the hole”…or was it “Chicken hole for the soup”? Anyway, Pamela Anderson suddenly appeared on TV and a hot spoonful missed its intended target and fell on to my uncle’s stomach. The spilt soup, on contact with a stomach chilled by Arlem beer, made a hissing noise as it traveled vertically unheeded through the forest of human hairs, from the top of the stomach to collect in the navel, 9 torturous centimeters below. I’m sure to have seen some white smoke emanate during the descent of the scalding liquid a la the gravy train. My uncle immediately bolted upright from his rocking chair and made several urgent animal sounds that cannot be transcribed in any earthly language known to man (or woman or child). On hearing a bloodcurdling soprano cry of sudden pain, the negro maid, hired since the time Africans secretly invaded India, came running to investigate. Not finding any damping cloth handy, she immediately lifted her skirt and dabbed the infected portion of my uncle’s belly, thus hiking up the intensity of the situation. Just close your eyes and picture this, if you can. Priceless!!! This was the first time within 2 hours of my visit that my attention got willfully diverted from the giant belly. However, bodily damage was done. The soup had burnt a long rivulet along its fiery trail. The hairy stomach cosmetically resembled an inverted SBI logo, and ironically, my uncle is a retired banker. I made a mental note to ask him later, if the soup had really caused him any pain, and possibly incur some bad soup karma from the anticipated release of human emotions.

After a heavy starchy dinner of rice gruel and salty fish, and having had the opportunity to relax and get fully intoxicated, I decided it was time I have some fun on my own. Just when I was about to spend some quality time with some of my neglected anatomical parts, my uncle decided it was time to have a shoulder to cry on. As he cranked and cried about the state of his life in general, I realized what a liability his stomach had been. Due to his immense girth, my uncle could not bend down to put on his shoes – I wanted to ask him when was the last time he cleaned his toes, but decided against it, as the awkward thinking question would mess with the gravity of that grave situation. Foremost on my mind was a more pertinent question: did the size of that stomach prevent him from squatting and therefore washing away wasteful remnants of the daily digestion process ritually performed in the Indian way? Within seconds I easily inferred that since my uncle could not squat, he must have not visited the latrine for years. That probably explained the overgrown stomach. I was amazed with myself, for having decoded the problem so speedily and, at the same time, wondered if someone like Einstein could have done equally well in my place. After all, what did Einstein do, but relate some alphabets together viz: E=MC2, whereas I had just solved a life threatening situation.

It is a known fact to no one, that once I get thinking, I cannot stop. With a diagnosis now made, several questions sprinted through my mind: could this expanded stomach problem have occurred because of some blockage that needed to be bypassed surgically (with GI pipes and tubes)? I was sure that the stomach contents, not having being expelled for a long time, must have been fossilized internally by now. The situation was getting scary by the hour. I was harbouring thoughts of being quarantined if the stomach chose to suddenly burst in my peaceful presence. The positive side was that my uncle had unwittingly become the only living and walking Gober gas plant worthy of mention in a book of world records. And imagine the freedom of not having to spend on a piped gas connection for cooking with my uncle around; for breakfast, my uncle could squat beneath a frying pan and I just needed to strike a match nearby. Can you see intelligence, essentially lacking in Einstein, being amply displayed by me? Right?

Anyway, I calmly told my uncle that my Physics Degree and MBA course had equipped me with forward thinking abilities, and I could use that knowledge to effectively reduce his paunch, and thereby put all of his other (hygiene) problems to a dying rest. I told him that I would immediately need to set him on a daily diet of two bananas and five channas. Additionally, he would have to get up each morning at 4:38 am and let me stand on his stomach for an hour or so. He flatly refused, even though I repeatedly insisted how this measure had great scientific merit. But alas, my uncle was simply being obstinate. Sometimes, we can’t seem to see what’s good for us. Besides, weren’t we taught in school that elders must be respectful and obedient to youngsters? Being the good guy that I always am, I decided to help my uncle at all costs.

Early next morning, around the devil’s hour (03:33am), my uncle snored in fast sleep on his bed. I donned my army gear: camouflage jacket, metal tipped boots, combat accessories et al, and quietly tiptoed into his room. I put on my mini light and gingerly lifted his vest, thinking of what my poor eyes would have to endure if, by some strange twist of fate, this happened to be my aunt instead. The thought of having him wake up on me and having to answer why my hands were lifting his vest in the dead of night, didn’t cross my mind. In the dim nightlight, the stomach looked like a giant mountain and the soup trail looked like a dried-up waterfall. With my magnifying glass, I inspected, from all angles, how the soupy unsub had totally incinerated the heat boil at the sternum on its destructive way down. Maybe, I could patent the soup concoction as an acne cure? Zitty women could simply apply hot chicken soup on their faces instead of expensive cosmetic goo of unknown origin? Where is Einstein when we need him to corroborate anything?

I fished my pocked for my Jedi master blaster. With the grace of an accomplished swordfighter, I swiped a high-powered torch laterally across my uncle’s stomach several times in rapid succession. The beam refracted and reflected on the various belly contours creating some very scary celestial images on the ceiling in that darkened room. Theatrically stepping back, I surveyed the scene, as my uncle snored – actually, roared – to glory. My fingers caressed my chin as a thought popped into my head. Properly disguised, two people with grossly inflated stomachs sleeping side-by-side would surely have put Pamela Anderson out of business.

It was time for some noble work: I carefully retrieved a packet of silvery ash from my pocket. This resulted from several finely powdered Diwali sparklers. Starting from near my uncle’s groin, I sprinkled the silver gunpowder all around the naked stomach in one big gradually narrowing concentric artwork to end at the navel. I lit a match and stepped back. There can be no other human on any galaxy who could have ever witnessed this custom fiery chakra display. The fire ran around the concentric path, hissing and fuming, rising and falling, with each awesome snoring breath. This was totally unreal, and sadly, my uncle slept through it all. The design that my uncle’s stomach now had was so hypnotic that I was afraid to look at it for fear of the unknown. The next morning my uncle freaked out on seeing the state of his stomach. The vertical burn path was overlapped by the concentric one. His stomach now had a custom hair design from some 70ies show. I calmly explained that eating certain pungent food the previous night could have been responsible for the release of extra amounts of gastric acid that supposedly manifested externally as a UFO sign. Somehow, I could tell that my uncle greatly doubted my prodigious knowledge of metaphysics. Though I avoided my uncle for the rest of the day, I noticed him noticing his tummy in the mirror. I’d give all my money to discover what he must have been thinking. Maybe, the stomach had a hypnotic effect on him, I surely can’t say.

Obviously, the next night it was time for work again: Since my uncle downed whisky before bedtime, I knew he would sleep soundly. As before, I slowly uncovered the stomach once again. I gave the stomach a few sharp thumps and heard several echoes and sounds of nuts and bolts falling from within. I carefully inspected the dark depths of uncle’s navel – it was a black hole as big as my eye, which threatened suck me if I got too close. I rolled my sleeping uncle on his front – something he had not done in years. I set him to balance so that only his nose and paunch touched the bed surface. He looked like a discarded torpedo that had diagonally crashed into the bed. The depressed stomach thereby caused the musical leakage of 400 cubic centimeters of noxious gas, which immediately sent me reeling and gagging. This task was proving more difficult than I initially envisaged, but I pursued on in the interests of science and adventure. Taking a magnifier in that semi-darkness, I inspected the sides of the stomach – there was not even a single stretch mark on that taunt skin. It seemed that the stretch marks had also been stretched. When your thinking hits a roadblock, you have to think the unthinkable: I rolled that boulder back on his back, and this was an effort that required a good amount of testosterone. Since the torch abruptly died on me, I fixed a candle into my uncle’s navel and lit it – if you were with me, some of you would have been immediately overcome by feelings of romanticism by this candlelight ambience and would have surely started kissing the bedroom mirror absentmindedly. Anyway, the candle went up and down with each breath. It would be great if only I could just arrive at a magic solution to decrease the size of that stomach. I then thought: what if I suddenly delivered 2500 simultaneous pin pricks to the stomach, karate style? Wouldn’t this cause an even dispersal of gas, resulting in a flat stomach in no time? To test this prick theory, I smeared sugar water on the entire stomach. In about 7 seconds, 53 anopheles mosquitoes descended on the stomach and started some heavy-duty wood pecking. The mosquito that had sat on the spent stomach heat boil died immediately from a toxic overdose. I then did a laxity check by gently squeezed the tires of fat from the sides of the stomach. This caused the navel officer to pop out at attention, shooting the anchored candle 2 feet away from the bed. In fright and in sudden darkness, I released my hands and the navel button dived back in, never to be seen ever again to this day. What if I diverted the fat to another torso area, I thought? Since all of the frontal area was usurped by the stomach, the booblings seemed the next likely guinea pigs. By an ancient art of alternating acupuncture and acute pressure I learnt from an African druid who masquerades as a medical consultant with my company, I evenly distributed the excess stomach fat between the two booblings. And voila!!! – a desi shemale version of Pamela Anderson was instantaneously created in that nocturnal workspace. All my uncle need to do now was change his name to Arther Anderson, so that he could be easily linked as a willing relative of the Baywatch star.

Awaking the next morning and seeing the partial change in his gender, my uncle gave a heart-rending cry of horror. His stomach was flat – a ribbing sexy six pack like my stomach is perpetually supposed to be, – but his booblings were a big story. In spite of my innocent visage, he suspected that I must be the origin and continuous source of a string of natural calamities, not particularly described here, that had suddenly befallen him in his humble abode since my visit. Without much ado, I was immediately slapped with 5 pudgy fingers that constantly smelled of fish, and packaged and dispatched to Mumbai amidst the company of two unrelenting sweaty goan thugs wearing tight bellbottoms with fish curry stains. They didn’t even let me get decently dressed for the trip. I know a lot of people who would have paid dearly for my freely rendered services, such as Dolly Partition or Nikhole Smith. I explained a suitable business proposition to these thugs, but realized that they were thoughtfully chosen by my scheming uncle – they did not know a word of English. But next year, I hope my uncle will forget this aborted scientific experiment and let me stay at his house and date his budding daughter, and probably try some creative as well as procreative scientific experiments on her.

If I could, without fear of life and precious limb, broadcast the successful feminine realization of my experiment on my uncle, wouldn’t I be in league with noted scientists such as …say…. Einstein? Nevertheless, it is my contention that many will actively seek my free body / image enhancement services if plagued by similar problems. And one day, I shall emerge as a brilliant scientist in this world.